Installing surround sound card on Linux: Sandberg USB Sound Box 7.1

Installing surround sound card on Linux: Sandberg USB Sound Box 7.1

Recently I needed advanced sound hardware for my computer. Dolby® Surround 5.1 support was a must, several input and output options as well. Then I came across Sandberg USB Sound Box 7.1 which appeared to be a reasonable choice. Sadly, manufacturer does not officially support Linux, however, here is my quick guide to make it work nice and smooth.

First of all, about the device:

USB 2.0 interface

USB audio device class spec. 1.0

USB HID class spec.1.1 compliant

Support 48/44.1 KHz sampling rate for both playback and recording

1 x 3.5 mm jack for headphone connection

4 x 3.5 mm jack for multi channel speaker set connection

1 x 3.5 mm jack for line-in connection

2 x 3.5 mm jack for microphone connection

1 x S/PDIF Toslink optical digital input

1 x S/PDIF Toslink optical digital output

Packaging:

1 Sandberg USB Sound Box 7.1

1 USB connection cable 1.8 metres

1 CD with driver and Xear 3D software (Windows only…)

1 User guide

About Linux compatibility from Sandberg FAQ:

Will this product run on Linux?
Yes, but the software provided is not supported by Linux. You can use software such as Alsa and Pulse Audio instead. Please note, however, that Sandberg does not support Linux.

What a shame. Whole setup is piece of cake on my favourite Linux Mint. Let’s get started.

Connect your surround sound card to computer via USB interface, wait a few seconds while it tries to identify device and then hook it up to your surround system. Connection diagram is provided in official user manual, so I’m not going to cover this.

Open Software Manager and search for “pulseaudio” or use nice Terminal to install it by command:

sudo apt-get install pavucontrol

Which is actually something Sandberg advise on their FAQ. Next, having PulseAudio doesn’t mean your device starts working automagically – you need to set modes. Go ahead and open on your Cinnamon menu Sound & Video > PulseAudio Volume Control and pick values as shown:

That is actually the problem of Sandberg USB Sound Box 7.1 – it outputs surround only through analog. Unfortunately, this is not specified anywhere when you buy this device, but TOSLINK here only outputs stereo only 🙁 Or at least I didn’t find a way to output 5.1 or 7.1 through device’s TOSLINK (S/PDIF) out with Linux Mint (which is based on Ubuntu).

Once I’ve tried this device on Windows XP netbook with Sandber’s official driver. However, then I calso couldn’t get anything more than stereo through optical out, therefore I assume Sandberg USB Sound Box 7.1 only supports stereo (PCM 2.0) for digital input and output.

I used this sound card to output synthesized MIDI input as described in this article (Lithuanian). In my case MIDI was sending signal to JACK, it was directing MIDI input to software synthesizer (ZynAddSubFx) and returning result to ALSA. ALSA is managing this particular sound card and it was playing as expected.